October 18, 2014

Time and time again, I hear the wise old members of our society insisting that my generation has been gravely misled. They claim that, by telling every child that they are special, no one is. They claim that everyone can't be above average.

This is painfully ridiculous.

When someone says that every child is special, they are saying that each child is special in their own way. Each child is blessed with a gift of their own, wholly unique to them. Every child being above average is only a paradox if you are lumping every single human experience into one giant number, which is an insulting perversion of the diversity of life.

No human being will ever produce the exact same art, or solve a problem in the exact same way. Each of us brings our own unique experiences to the table, and that is why we are all valuable. Only by exploring a plurality of techniques can we find a better one. Only by bringing to bear a huge number of unique perspectives on a problem can we find an exceptionally elegant solution. One of those perspectives will see something that most of us don't. One of those perspectives will create a work of art that no other human being could have conceived.

Yes, every child is special. Yes, every child can be above average... in their chosen field of interest.

A good example of this is to look at artists. Almost any artist who can do rudimentary shading is an above average artist. This is because most people aren't professional artists. Once you start looking at professions, having even the tiniest drop of talent will likely catapult you into being above average, because our modern world is full of specialists. If you pick any random profession, the average skill level of that profession, when summing over the whole of the human race, will be close to zero, because most people aren't in that profession.

So, simply by choosing a profession and learning the basics of it, a human being will be capable of doing things most other people can't.

Telling kids they're special is simply saying that they are unique, and that no other human being is like them. This is, much to the frustration of the institutions who would prefer us to be mindless factory drones, the truth. We each approach life in our own way, slightly different from everyone else. One person's perspective may seem useless and bland, just a pale shadow of everyone else, until they happen to stumble on that one place where their slightly different view of the world let's them see something no one else can.

When talking about a person as a whole, no one is better than anyone else. We simply experience the world in different, equally valid ways. We can be better than other people at a specific thing, but not in general.

Every snowflake is unique, but only when you look at them under a microscope. In the grand flurry of life, they all seem to blur together, forming featureless piles of uniformity. It is not enough to look for the truly exceptional. We must recognize that even the most insignificant details can make all the difference in the world.